Many schools and universities across the world have been going online to increase the efficiency of their day-to-day operations through Google Apps Education Edition. The increased adoption of schools moving to Apps has been particularly significant in India, especially as a result of our recent Got the "App"titude Challenge. This challenge encouraged students, faculty members, and alumni from engineering and management schools throughout India to move their institutions to Google Apps.

The challenge created quite a stir, and after launching in August, more than 6,000 teams signed up consisting of students, faculty, and alumni. Each team worked with their own IT staff to identify challenges and limitations with their existing email and collaboration systems, and then, working with a Googler, demonstrated the ways in which Google Apps could mitigate these issues.

The performance of each team was evaluated by measuring product usage after their deployment. We'd like to extend our congratulations to the XL CONNECT team from Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI) - Jamshedpur, who won the challenge by demonstrating the highest usage of Google Apps products. This team ran a pilot and implemented Google Apps within less than a month from the day they secured approval from their college's decision makers. They also conducted marketing campaigns to inspire students to find innovative ways to use Google Apps tools. Chintan Agarwal, secretary of the Systems Society at XLRI says, "Considering the need for a networked manager and the high reliability and usability of Google Apps, we have rolled-out Apps services for all XLers, including international students at Singapore and Dubai."

Below is a map of all the schools across India who will be rolling out Apps on campus after participating in the challenge. We look forward to continuing to fill up the map as more schools across the globe get the "App"titude.

It's hard for me to imagine going without email for a day. It's such an easy and convenient way to communicate with my friends and family. However, there was one limitation that bothered me: my family members and friends who prefer to communicate in Hindi did not have an easy way to type and send email in their language of choice. I am therefore extremely happy to announce the launch of a new feature in Gmail that makes it easy to type email in Indian languages.

When you compose a new mail in Gmail, you should now see an icon with an Indian character, as the screenshot below shows. This feature is enabled by default for Gmail users in India. If you do not see this function enabled by default, you will need to go the "Settings" page and enable this option in the "Language" section.

When you click the Indian languages icon, you can type words the way they sound in English and Gmail will automatically convert the word to its Indian local language equivalent. For example, if a Hindi speaker types "namaste" we will transliterate this to "नमस्ते." Similarly, "vanakkam" in Tamil will become "வணக்கம்." We currently support five Indian languages -- Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam -- and you can select the language of your choice from the drop-down list next to the icon.

We built this new feature using Google's transliteration technology, which is also available on Google India Labs, Orkut, Blogger and iGoogle. I hope you find this feature useful to communicate with those of your friends and family who prefer to write in their native language, and it will be available soon to businesses and schools using Google Apps. Now back to replying to all those Hindi emails I got from my family and friends today!

March 27, 2009

In this third post on our mobile friendly websites series , we discuss mobile markup languages. There is a lack of standardization for everything mobile - different platforms, different APIs and different markups. There are a bunch of mobile markups that co-exist today: WML, XHTML, CHTML (iMode), HTML 4.0 and now HTML 5. The key to selecting the right markup again, as pointed out in previous post, is to look at your target audience. Let's start with the basics.

Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) is the protocol which enables mobile access to internet sites. WAP 1.0, introduced in 1998, supported Wireless Markup Language (WML) while the recent versions WAP 2.0 supports Extensible HTML (XHTML) with mandated backward compatibility for WML. Most devices sold today are WAP 2.0 compliant, which means XHTML has become a preferred markup language for mobile websites. CHTML or compact HTML is mostly popular in Japan and works on DoCoMo 's i-mode mobile phones. Recent high-end phones like iPhone and Nokia S60s now have HTML capable browsers.

Let's talk more about XHTML given its popularity. XHTML is basically a well-formed, stricter subset of HTML and has limited scripting support. XHTML-Basic was designed by W3C for constrained devices, which, in turn, was extended by the WAP forum to be called XHTML- Mobile Profile (XHTML-MP). XHTML-MP is the default standard for WAP 2.0. One advantage of using XHTML MP as a markup is that as a developer you can use the same technologies to support your desktop and WAP pages. Ordinary web browsers can be used to view your WAP site during the development process. Many Google products like Orkut Mobile, etc are available in XHTML-MP.

<p><b> This is not okay for XHTML but would be just fine with HTML </p></b>

<p><b> All is well! </b></p>

2. Case Sensitivity: Both Tags and their attributes are case sensitive in XHTML. The simple and stric rule is that all tags and attributes must be written in lower case. For example,

<a href="myMobilePage.html">My Mobile Website</a>

3. End Tags: End tags are compulsory with XHTML, For example, <p> should be matched with </p> . What about line breaks? Include the end tab in its opener: <hr />

4. Attribute values: Every attribute needs to have a value. An exception to this rule is that certain attributes like "selected" in radio button in html don't need a value but XHTML needs: selected = "selected". Every attrribute value must be in double quotes. For example,

<img src="mobileIcon.gif" height="150" width="40"/>

You can use the W3C Validator to validate your XHTML. ready.mobi has some very useful tools like validators and emulators which can help with your website development. Other Dos and Don'ts:

Do

make use of accesskeys

resize images on server side based on device screen size

make sure that correct encoding is used

Do not

use iframes and tables

use fancy form elements and multipart data uploads

keep multiple scrolls

have links to unsupported doctypes

have pop ups

Ajax and Javascript can really help spice and speed up your websites. We will try to cover those in detail in a separate post.

The latest phone browsers now support HTML 4.0. With xHTML and HTML being supported by the new mobile phones, you can pretty much write anything that is possible on a desktop website. However, the responsibility of it looking good on a mobile phone now squarely falls in the your hands. Your apps can be content and feature rich but will be available on the high end phones only. An example of such a feature rich browser app is Orkut on iPhone.

A small note on the future before we end. HTML5 now has a capability of having a local database that a phone can maintain locally among the many new features. It is currently available on phones like iPhone 3G and Google's just announced android phone HTC Magic. Check out the online demo presented by Vic Gundotra to experience the power of this features.